On Awilum today, Charles Halton notes that two Kevins, myself and Kevin Edgecomb, have been blogging about higher criticism. He notes that Kevin Edgecome is critical of the higher criticism, and wonders how I might respond. So, I thought I would respond.

Edgecomb laments the fact that originally, the historical critical method arose before texts from other ancient Near Eastern cultures had been deciphered (Akkadian and Egyptian) or discovered (Ugaritic). In particular, he points out that the Documentary Hypothesis arose in a textual vacuum without use of the comparative data from the ancient world. He laments the fact that these critical theories have not been reevaluated in light of these discoveries.

I would have to disagree with this last sentence. Obviously work in the 19th century did not have all the texts we have today, so it is no surprise they did not work with them. But a great deal of reassessment of these theories has in fact been done since the early 20th century. The Documentary Hypothesis as understood today is rather different than the Documentary Hypothesis as Wellhausen understood it. Some, such as myself, have abandoned the Documentary Hypothesis (for different reasons than Edgecomb), while others have modified it significantly. And to say that no attention has been payed to the comparative material while doing this is simply wrong. Take, for example, the work of Carr, who point to parallels between the growth of the Pentateuch and the way that the Epic of Gilgamesh developed over time.1. In this, he is working from the studies of Tigay, who has published several works on empirical evidence for documentary development in other ancient Near Eastern texts.2

Edgecomb notes that texts from Ugarit in particular have provided us with more information about ways in which ancient texts do not follow Western literary practices. With this I agree. But he goes on to state,

Repetition has many uses, and was in particular a now well-recognized ancient Eastern literary device, at both the level of sentence (as in the case of double- or triple-stich proverbs) and also at the level of narratives (as in Assyrian royal inscriptions, Ugaritic narrative poetry, and Hebrew “historical” narrative). That means no Wellhausen/Documentary Hypothesis, no J, no E, no P, no D.

This is quite a jump from repitition to no J, E, P, or D. The Documentary Hypothesis never rested solely or even primarily on repetition. For example, both Genesis 12 and Genesis 26, which repeat the wife-sister story, are both considered to originate in J. Any hypothesis that rested only on repetition would be problematic, which is why it is only one of many clues that scholars seek when trying to sort out layers in the Pentateuch.

Edgecomb admires the comparative approach of William Hallo (who was one of my Akkadian professors) and wishes that scholars would follow it more. I like it too. It was the main approach employed by my professors, even those who followed higher criticism. The two are complimentary approaches, not mutually exclusive ones.

Edgecomb ends by saying that he would not be averse to throwing out all scholarship from before 1980 because of its “hidebound inheiritance of ‘critical scholarship’.” If he does so, he will miss out on a lot of good scholarship. While there are always some things that need to be updated and reexamined, this does not mean that everything prior to 1980 was wrong. I would hate to think where we would be in biblical scholarship today if we were to ignore Gunkel, von Rad, and Noth. He is wrong in thinking that all comparative studies are recent. In reality, it has been the hallmark of scholarship since the late 19th century.


  1. David M. Carr, Reading the Fractures of Genesis (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1996), 16-17 [back]
  2. Jeffrey Tigay, The Evolution of the Gilgamesh Epic (Philadelphia: U of Philadelphia Press, 2002); Jeffrey Tigay, “An Epirical Basis for the Documentary Hypothesis,” JBL 94 (1975): 229-242. [back]
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